Institute

Founded in 1994, the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin is one of the more than 80 research institutes administered by the Max Planck Society. It is dedicated to the study of the history of science and aims to understand scientific thinking and practice as historical phenomena.

People

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science comprises scholars across all Departments and Research Groups, as well as an Administration team, IT Support, Research IT Group, and Research Coordination and Communications team.

Publications & Resources

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) engages with the research community and broader public, and is committed to open access.

This section provides access to published research results and electronic sources in the history of science. It is also a platform for sharing ongoing research projects that develop digital tools.

Researchers at the Institute benefit from an internal Library service. The Institute’s research is also made accessible to the wider public through edited Feature Stories and the Mediathek’s audio and video content.

News & Events

The Max Planck Institute for the History of Science frequently shares news, including calls for papers and career opportunities. The Media & Press section highlights press releases and the Institute's appearances in national and global media. Public events—including colloquia, seminars, and workshops—are shown on the events overview.

The Infrastructures of Sequence Data in Biology

This project provided two examples of the very specific ways in which data is tied to the technologies and practices of computing and information technologies. The examples suggest that big data cannot exist outside of these computational infrastructures. First, it described Walter's Goad's work at Los Alamos that led ultimately to the development of the GenBank database. Here the use of data arose from specific kinds of computational practices that were originally developed for weapons work. Second, it examined some of the work of making and updating the Ensembl database run by the European Bioinformatics Institute. In this case, the generation, structuring, and use of the data are tied to the technologies and practices of the World Wide Web. The examples highlight some of the novelties of big data and big data practices: not only its size, but also in how it is manipulated and used through numerical methods, relational database structures, machine learning, hyperlinking, and topological analysis. The project suggested that this novelty warrants some new social science approaches to studying data that allows us to follow it inside machines, software, and databases—that is, we need to supplement material culture approaches with data culture approaches.